The kings of the piste

Thanks to modern safety improvements, motor racing is not quite as dangerous as it used to be – although it probably still takes nerves of steel to hurtle around a circuit in a modern F1 car – but if there is a sport that for me demonstrates sporting bravery at its most extreme, it has to be the downhill skiing and bob-sleigh events I am currently watching at the Winter Olympics near Turin.

Being only a moderately competent skier myself, I bow in awe when I see the pros hurtle down icy slopes at speeds touching 100 mph. Wow.

I’m someone who’s been described as an advanced skier and have done race training on a few occasions. Those men and women who point their skis straight down the mountain and let’em go are lunatics. Really, they are lunatics.

I know a trainer who used to race for GB at junior levels and is a dream on skis, once keeping up with me on slalom and GS runs with a stopwatch in one hand and clipboard in the other. I asked him one day why he didn’t take it all the way instead of becoming a trainer – was it lack of funding, injury – or what?

“No” he says, “I lost my bottle. Those downhillers you see are nuts and I just couldn’t do it anymore”

Two days later I stood beside the OK run in Val d’Isere and watched the men’s World Cup downhill. As in F1, television doesn’t do them justice. It just doesn’t convey how fast these racers are going. At the Hahnnenkahm in Kitzbuhel the quickest men are doing 95 mph at one point! I have no doubt you must be a bit odd to do that for a living.

Julian, even if you don’t break every bone in your body in a fall, you’ll end up with the knees of an eighty year old after a career on the moguls. BTW, the moguls are done on snow. The alpine events are on ice.

Who Are We?

The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.